Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Saturday, September 07, 2013

Pissing Contests with Skunks

Embattled as he is in
Washington and around the world, Barack Obama may find himself pondering the
earthy wisdom of a favorite predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower.

“I don’t want to get into a
pissing contest with that skunk,” Ike told his Secretary of State about Sen.
Joe McCarthy’s putrid emanations on American foreign policy. Years later, on his
dark porch overlooking blood-soaked Gettysburg, the former President was still
nursing the pain of that conflict, muttering “I didn’t want to get into the
gutter with that guy.”

Now, Obama finds himself in
multiple urinating matches with Assad, Putin, even his own allies in Congress
over the prospect of lethal conflict with Syria. Sadly, he won’t find answers
in Eisenhower’s experience, but it may suggest other choices.

Back then, in the absence of
presidential leadership, it took TV icon Edward R. Murrow and aging Boston
lawyer Joseph Welch (“Have you, sir, no sense of decency at long last?”) to start
turning Americans away from McCarthyism toward sanity.

Ike’s hunkering down didn’t
work. What, in the light of Obama’s choice to put himself into such contests,
can he do now?

Even as he asks for support in
his Weekly Address, the President sounds defensive: “I know that the American
people are weary after a decade of war, even as the war in Iraq has ended, and
the war in Afghanistan is winding down. That’s why we’re not putting our troops
in the middle of somebody else’s war.

“We can’t ignore chemical weapons
attacks like this one--even if they happen halfway around the world.”

Next week, as he tries to rally the nation behind that belief, Barack Obama should agree to delay any
strike against Syria if Congress does not sanction it and use every possible
diplomatic pressure against Assad in the meantime.

That would be a stance more
befitting a Nobel Peace Prize winner than a pissant politician worrying about
his own reputation and credibility.